LurkNautili
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Posts posted by LurkNautili
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I thought it was obvious, EVE before Plex. [. . .] You missed the point as it wasn't targeted to pre-PLEX but post-PLEX.
Which is it? You've got to make up your mind. I'm not sure if you're ignoring the point on purpose or if you misread what I wrote. In either case, I won't repeat myself.
And if caught the game would lose its reputation and likely fold within a few weeks once players tell news outlets like RPS and Polygon about it. I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but this is an entirely self-correcting issue.
I just explained to you how you can do it without getting caught, therefore this point is moot.
How has Elite Dangerous pulled this off then? I realize all ED provides is match making but still they have infrastructure to maintain. How did EVE pull it off for so many years? Moreover, how does my son's football team pull off playing without paying the refs for a first down, or extra yards?
I'll preface this by saying I haven't played ED, and I'm not very familiar with its mechanics. However, I asked around, and apparently there isn't much to be gained by paying in ED, and the progression is mostly lateral, as opposed to vertical (amassing wealth and power). A bigger ship isn't a difference in power, it's a difference in kind/style.
As for your son, I haven't the slightest. Presumably, he doesn't play at a high enough level for there to be enough competitive incentive to cheat. However, if you look at a more reasonable example of professional sports with big money involved or other compelling reasons to seek an advantage, people cheat bribe and especially use illegal substances all the freaking time. Your example kind of defeats itself.
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My community has a very simple defining method: Place two hypothetical players in the game, one with a $100.00 budget and one with a $100,000 -- if the player with a $100,000 budget has broader access to the game, stats, money, etc because of his budget, it is pay to win.
Can you give an example of a game that has resources, ownership of some kind, and a means of transfering those resources between players, and is not pay-to-win?
Your pre-PLEX EvE example doesn't work. At best, disallowing real world trading (to borrow the Runescape term) is a hindrance (but there will always be ways around any detection system, report system, whatever -- it's a cat and mouse game like virus scanning, hack-antihack, etc. and it cannot be solved), and at worst it does nothing but waste developer time (you have to screen reports, comb through logs, develop fluky, heuristic detection algorithms, etc.)
In the end, the best, sneakiest and most successful corporations will simply be doing it without you even knowing about it. Example: instead of buying ships offline in some obvious manner where resources trade hands in an obviously imbalanced fashion, they could just pay people to play the game under their corporation, and they'd just be regular members funneling in resources through legitimate means. And yet on the corporate level, they're buying -- to win!
The model you're proposing is mathematically impossible, intractable, completely futile. It cannot be done. So long as the real world is ruled by money, you'll be able to pay someone to win at a game. This mainly applies to games with persistence, with resources, and with stats. In games like CS:GO, you won't see the problem to the same extent, because the only real resource is skill, and to a lesser degree rank. The problem still manifests in a different form, however. In CS, you can pay someone to boost your rank (completely twisted way of looking at ELO, but our world warps our psychology in many F'd up ways), or you can pay someone to make cheats for you, to essentially "buy skill". No way around it. No permanent solution. You want to get rid of pay-to-win? Get rid of money, bring about world peace, transition to a post-scarcity, egalitarian society. Basically make utopia happen, and then we can have true equality. Until then, you're chasing your tail, and wasting your breath. Sorry =/
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Service fabric doesn't handle things like inter-cell connectivity or geographic dispersion. The is something you'd have to write yourself. Service fabric is a framework / engine for clustering, and service partition node and failover management.
You'd handle regions by making each region an "actor" or "service" for example and distribute those services across available nodes. You're responsible for spatial divisions (an octree is just a highly efficient way of indexing spatial data, and many games use them).
It's kind of painful reading the docs on that tech. It's so bloated with Microsoft-speak and jargon, to a degree that doesn't seem entirely necessary (but that's MS for ya I guess). Their introductory page seems like 10% technical explanation and examples and 90% marketing spiel.
Regardless, I guess the gist of it is that you break a problem down into some small components that can be replicated, like their example of thousands of user profiles or databases or whatever (in your hypothetical example, regions of space). So basically you delegate the responsibility of distributing the load evenly (and densely) on server hardware, instead of designing that by hand, which means you just have to design the server program in a more granular way (broken up into these "service" things). That's cool and all, but it leaves many questions unanswered. I'm also not too happy about how the effectively black box of the server fabric technology obscures implementation details (and hence makes the kind of estimation of efficiency and feasibility kind of difficult, as far as I can tell).
Given all that, how would you design the actual inter-region communications? Do they all talk to eachother directly? Do they only talk to adjacent regions? How do you deal with network delay between regions if they're not geographically adjacent in real life?
Best I can think of is a thing where you do the octree division thing to figure out which clients will be in the same region (cell as NQ calls them), figure out which of their server locations is closest to the center of the clients' geographic locations (ping-wise, in a least squares sense), and assign a node from that cluster to them. Then the avatars closest to you in the game world would have, on average, as low a ping as possible. But things then get more complicated if you want to minimize the distances between the chosen geographic locations for nodes for adjacent regions... given a completely random geographic distribution of connected clients.
You seem to be much more informed on these sorts of problems in practice with typical solutions -- what would you propose?
Age of Ascent (a space game supporting 50,000+ players in a single twitch combat battle) has a lot of public available architecture information, which I based a lot of my hypothesis on. It's pretty well documented too. http://web.ageofascent.com/blog/
Holy shit that's actually a thing? So at least a bare-bones version of this is technically feasible? That does make me... somewhat less nervous. Time to read up on them next, I suppose.
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I don't have the same kind of experience with networking architectures, but I guess you could call what I posted in the Q&A thread speculation, in the form of questions.
In case we don't get official answers by the time the campaign ends, how feasible would you speculate this hypothetical architecture is in practice?
I'm skeptical myself, and my gut feeling is that the project is more likely to fail than succeed, but I'm tempted to back it anyway, to some extent.
I'm not sure I understand a couple parts of your post. Firstly, what kind of other overhead are you counting in for the GbE ports? 200*5KB/s only accounts for about 1% of the total throughput, right? Secondly, could you elaborate on how the Azure type system works, specifically in terms of inter-cell connectivity and optimizing geographically disperse clients' connections?
The model I hypothesized in my other post would have clients in the same world-region (leaf of the space dividing tree) would be connected to the same physical hardware server, but would it be smarter if what we see in the demo video of this is just a logical division of avatars in space and they're actually connected on a client-by-client basis to physically proximal server hardware?
As I said, I've no clue what I'm talking about when it comes to "smarter" networking with load balancing and such, I've never looked into it and it might just be way over my head.
P.S. FYI - not a dev (by trade, anyway)
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I totally understand his frustration, personally. I'm noticing a tendency on this forum of people answering questions they don't actually know the answers to.
That said, I'm currently pledged under the assumption that these peoples' claim is correct (it is the done thing, and as such a reasonable interpretation), and I'm feeling more secure in that assumption than e.g. technical feasibility and some other concerns, which I'm hoping to see resolved before the campaign ends, as I'm still kind of on the fence about backing this project.
But until we actually hear from devs, I'm not taking any assumption for granted.
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I'm all for it. Just like fall damage, collision damage is an essential part of an immersive experience.
To the naysayers: without knowing full details of their implementation, you can't say whether their system can or cannot handle the overhead, or whether they can or cannot come up with workarounds for apparent dead-ends.
Take the whole single-shard model for instance. If I told you we could make a game like that before you knew about the model created by NQ, you'd have called me an idiot.
I shall reserve judgement until we get further details and perhaps more dialogue with NQ. I urge you to do the same.
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In no particular order, games with at least... I dunno, 50 hours?
- Minecraft
- Global Agenda
- ROSE Online
- APB
- Counter-Strike
- ArmA 3
- Planetside 2
- Robocraft
- Space Engineers
- DotA 2
- Firefall
- 7 Days to Die
- DayZ
- SourceForts
- Dystopia
- America's Army
- Fallen Earth
- TA: Spring
- GunZ: The Duel
- . . .
Just to name a few of the top of my head... Hard to think of some of the older ones and ones that aren't on Steam.
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I think that is too much for 1 person))) So I gonna use the first number.
Yeah, apologies for the triple post.
I was confused by the fact that the messages were pending approval. Not realizing it, I assumed I had a script blocked or something and made several attempts to post the message, until the last one where it dawned on me that now all of the posts were pending approval, without any means of retracting those posts.
The first one is what I intended anyways, now I just need to figure out how to remove the excess ones.
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<accidental triple post, please remove>
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<accidental triple post, please remove>
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653155€
My Community Has Withdrawn Our Pledges
in General Discussions
Posted
Even harder when your counterpart is incapable of deductive reasoning.
No, it is not the point I was trying to make. The point I was trying to get across that every game that has resources, exchange and competition, will always to some extent be pay-to-win, and it is inescapable. There will always be some way of paying somebody to gain an edge. All you can do is try to minimize it, incentivize against it and provide alternatives to level the playing field.
Strawman.
Then I can't affirmatively comment on it, but I will say that this leads me to believe your method of determining what's pay-to-win is biased and you've failed to identify the game as such. Or alternatively, the mechanics/balance of power aren't as you assert. But again, I'm not an authority on the game and hence this branch of the conversation is a dead end.
Riddle me this: what's stopping me from paying someone cash money, dolla dolla bills to give me one of those sick-ass ships?
These cats knew what they were talking about. With this bullshit status quo we've got to settle with for now, it's the green that makes the world go round.
And this has completely thwarted cheating, and doping isn't an actual thing and I've just dreamed up all this corruption in virtually every facet of the sporting world?
Ok, cool, I guess you win then.
*laughs out loud*
Seriously, man? Get real xD
I've never met anyone with glasses that rose tinted...
Jokes aside, you probably intend something like "Oh but they get caught and the system works and punishments are dealt" etc. etc. But none of that matters. Sure, people might get caught, sometimes we figure it out soon-ish, often only several years later. Point is, people cheat, and however temporal and transient, they still PAY to WIN, even if just for a moment. And that's all that matters to them, and to this conversation.